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To: Doren who wrote (27830)	3/10/2000 2:10:00 AM
From: Richard Habib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213182

RMBS is selling in the 820/840 motherboards which are in the higher end PCs from Dell, and HP among others. Intel also announced it will be in the high end PC/workstation Willamette machines and if the price comes down it will go into Timna which is Intel's intergrated "PC on a chip" for the lowest end of the market. I think most observers figure between 4-10% of the DRAM in terms of 64Mb equivalents will be RMBS this year. After that who knows. I've said before it appears that Intel brought it out a bit early because it's difficult to see real world advantages vs SDRAM right now. In the 1 Ghz machines under certain applications it may increase performance by as much as 15%. I think the key is that Intel believes as speeds reach 1.4Ghz and up that RMBS removes the bottleneck imposed by the memory. They think the advantage will become as much 30% by the end of the year vs SDRAM. Right now prices are extremely high but as of this month 5 of the major manufacturers will be producing - Samsung, Infineon, Hyundai, NEC and Toshiba. Micron says they will begin in Q3. One assumes that the price will come down although there are technical difficulties that will keep price parity from being reached in the near term. As regards DDR, it appears to be reasonable in the near term but as CPU speeds increase, DDR will have trouble keeping up. RMBS has a large patent portfolio that they feel will prevent anyone from increasing the speed of DDR without infringing. They have a suit against Hitachi now that claims infringement as regards DDR and SDRAM - so of course if they won that it would be a huge financial windfall for RMBS as they could possibly collect royalties for most memory. Because Apple PPC run at a lower design speed than Intel chips I would guess Apple sees DDR or staying with SDRAM as a better choice until RMBS is absolutely necessary. Hopefully, by then it will be easier to work with and cheaper. Rich